Dare to Be a Daniel (5 page)

Peter Eadie’s daughter, my maternal grandmother, Margaret, who worked on the Ring Traveller in Galashiels, met and married Daniel Holmes, who was born in 1863, the son of a steeplejack in Irvine. Daniel was a brilliant student who had become a teacher at Paisley Grammar School, having come first in the external examination for a degree at London University. The Holmes family belonged to the Irvine Brethren, a strict Christian sect.

Daniel also travelled up and down Scotland giving lectures at public libraries that had been funded by James Coats, a wealthy Scots industrialist. He wrote a book about it called
Literary Tours in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland
, which gives a vivid account of his travels and the very intellectual attitude of the Scots, together with their readiness to engage in intense discussions about political and theological questions.

He was very absent-minded. Mother told us that after leaving school he had been unsuccessfully apprenticed to a tailor. He was sent round to take the measurements of the customers, who later refused to accept the finished suits because they were all wrong. When Daniel and my grandmother went cycling on their honeymoon, she had a puncture and he cycled on, waving cheerily and saying, ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel’, leaving his bride to walk back alone.

Although when I knew Daniel, in old age, he seemed very conservative in his outlook and his liberalism appeared to me to be far to the right, he was reported – when adopted as a parliamentary candidate for Govan – as saying, ‘I am a radical by conviction, I shall give my utmost support to any measure which, in my opinion, is for the social wellbeing of the people. One great reason for our social misery is that too much of the land in this country is in the hands of private individuals.’ In these opinions he may well have been influenced by his father-in-law, Peter Eadie, who was a genuine radical.

In 1911 Daniel was duly elected to Parliament for Govan (in a by-election), and Mother told me that his political meetings were very well attended because he would use them to explore and explain his knowledge of ancient history. On one occasion he described to an interested audience that just before Vesuvius erupted, there was an election in Pompeii; he held his audience in rapt attention, although it had little to do with the manifesto on which he was standing.

He made his maiden speech on the Temperance (Scotland) Bill and entranced the House by saying, ‘I do not expect that, in our generation at least, alcohol will ever be out of date and when I look at the history and even the climate of my native country I know quite well that my fellow countrymen will never be sickeningly abstemious or ostentatiously teetotal.’

He was a talented poet and became known as the Poet Laureate of the House of Commons. One poem, which I quoted at my own retirement party in the Speaker’s House in 2001, ran as follows:

Daniel Holmes was not really a politician, but a teacher, and in that capacity he represented perfectly the deep commitment of his fellow countrymen and women to education and the importance of learning – describing himself as ‘a worshipper at learning’s shrine’. He was scholarly to the end and always carried around a copy of Dante’s
Inferno
in his pocket, and suitcases full of books.

I knew both my grandparents on my mother’s side, as they lived into the 1950s. But Mother had a strange childhood, because Daniel, being a very old-fashioned Scottish teacher, took little interest in her education and she spent much time in France and Switzerland as a child, because her parents moved there for a time; she learned French there, and was educated at home, though by the age of seven or eight she had not been taught to read or write properly. She never went to university, but compensated for this by developing her own interest in theology and studied for an STh (Student of Theology) qualification at King’s College London, after she had married my father and while she was having her children.

I had many interesting aunts, uncles and cousins, of whom two stand out in my memory.

M
Y
U
NCLE
E
RNEST

My father and his elder brother were both Liberals, but whereas Ernest was a ‘Manchester School’ Liberal, Father was a radical Liberal, and Ernest was very upset when Father decided in 1927 to join the Labour Party. But Father had a great deal of respect and affection for Ernest’s kindness towards our family.

We used to spend Christmas at his house in Oxted, Surrey – Blunt House – during my childhood up until 1935. Ernest was married to Gwen, who somewhat disapproved of my father. She was a magistrate and my father who, as a Privy Counsellor, could sit in any magistrate’s court, would tease her, threatening to come and sit in hers.

Ernest was a very good businessman; he took over the struggling trade-publications company Benn Brothers, founded by his father John, and turned it into a thriving business. After the First World War, Ernest had decided to move into book publishing and set up a new company called Ernest Benn, which was a great success, so that by 1918 he was earning £10,000 a year. This is why he was able to buy his grand Surrey mansion. Ernest was also extremely careful with money.

A young man called Victor Gollancz had been working voluntarily in my father’s parliamentary office, but decided that politics was not his interest, so Father suggested that he might go into publishing and recommended him to Ernest. Long before the advent of Penguin Books, Ernest introduced Benn’s Sixpenny Novels and they were a tremendous success, largely due to Victor; but when Victor asked my uncle to make him a partner, on the basis of the contribution he had made, Ernest refused. And so Gollancz left the firm and established his own publishing house.

Gollancz Books became an even greater success, and among the many titles for which Victor became famous were the Left Book Club publications, which had a profound impact on the development of socialist ideas during the 1930s. I once had the pleasure of hearing Gollancz speak during the war in a debate in Oxford about the need to admit Jewish refugees to Britain; it was so powerful that the students voted unanimously in favour of the motion.

Ernest was also a very successful writer and his most famous book,
The Confessions of a Capitalist
, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was published worldwide. He was an unashamed advocate of market forces, like Margaret Thatcher years later – whose election would have delighted him, although Ernest would have been very doubtful about the idea that a woman should have the responsibility of being Prime Minister. Ernest wrote another book about Russia, which began with the clear and simple statement that he had never been to Russia and had no intention of doing so while the Soviet regime continued to exist.

He engaged in public debates with Jimmy Maxton, the Scottish socialist; founded the Society of Individualists and, on principle, refused when he was in his seventies to fill in his census form for 1951, on the grounds that it was an infringement of his right to privacy. He was taken to court, and his barrister – in an attempt to be helpful – said, ‘I hope Your Honour will take account of the fact that Sir Ernest Benn is a very old man.’ This infuriated my uncle, who sacked his lawyer on the spot, pleaded guilty and was duly fined, but retained his self-respect.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Ernest was a genuine libertarian on
the
right in British politics. By contrast my father, who was also a Gladstonian Liberal, had acquired from the Grand Old Man a passion for liberty, which made him a rebel against the authority that money claimed to have over individuals. When he joined the Labour Party, Father moved naturally to the left – much like the Foot family, of which Michael (and later Dingle) found his natural home in the Labour Party, along with Josiah (Josh) Wedgwood, who joined the Labour Party on the same day as my dad in 1926.

It is assumed that I am related to the Wedgwoods. I always understood that my grandfather, who was an artist and greatly admired the work of the potter, gave the name Wedgwood to my father as a second Christian name, and my father did the same with all his children. My mother used to say that she thought that one of the family may have married a Wedgwood in the nineteenth century.

Relations between Uncle Ernest and his brother Will, my father, were rather complex. Ernest was generous to my father, who had worked as a journalist on Benn Brothers trade magazines and continued to receive assistance from him while an MP until salaries of £400 a year were introduced in 1910. Ernest also helped Father when he returned from the war in 1918 and lost his seat, due to boundary redistribution, and had to find a new constituency elsewhere; and lent him £1,500 to buy Stansgate, a retreat and holiday home in Essex, at a time when he was out of Parliament. Uncle Ernest generously allowed me to work for Benn Brothers after leaving Oxford, which meant that I could travel to America in 1949, ostensibly on behalf of the company, but with the real purpose of visiting my future wife, Caroline.

When I returned to Britain in 1949, Ernest was not prepared
to
re-engage me, which was why I was lucky to get my first paid job as a BBC producer at the princely salary of £9 a week.

M
ARGARET
R
UTHERFORD

It was through visiting my Uncle Ernest that I met my cousins, who were all much older than me, because Father was forty-three when he married. My first cousin once removed, the actress Margaret Rutherford, was my father’s first cousin.

She used to come to Blunt House for Christmas and seemed to me to be quite old, though she was only in her early forties and was making a living as a teacher of elocution and doing repertory theatre, hoping to make it big on the stage.

Many young girls want to go onstage, but it is unusual for that desire to be so strong later in life, and we used to treat this as an eccentricity. To the surprise and delight of the whole family, Margaret became a superstar, appearing in Noel Coward’s play
Spring Meeting
in 1933 and until her death in 1972 moving from triumph to triumph, one of her most successful performances being as Madame Arcati in
Blithe Spirit
, and playing a medieval historian in
Passport to Pimlico
. She also appeared with Alastair Sim in another famous film,
The Happiest Days of Your Life
, in which a girls’ and a boys’ school found themselves sharing the same premises during the war, and she and the boys’ headmaster were drawn into a conspiracy to prevent the parents from discovering this fact.

We had another sweet great-aunt called Auntie Tweenie, who lived in Oxted in a tiny house, which I think my uncle had bought for her and where we had tea on Boxing Day with cakes that she had baked; Margaret Rutherford watched her carefully and affectionately
and
I have an idea that some of her stage characters were based on her observations.

What I did not know at the time, and only discovered by chance later, was the family tragedy that lay behind Margaret’s story. I had often wondered how Margaret Rutherford was related to us and, if she was, why her surname was not Benn. When I asked about her father I was always brushed aside. If I tried to press my mother, all she would say was, ‘Darling, he never did anything to be ashamed of.’ And it was only when I was a Member of Parliament that I decided to consult
The Times
index and found the headline in 1883 about Margaret’s father, who murdered his own father, Julius.

Margaret’s father was William Rutherford Benn, son of Julius Benn (my great-grandfather). William married Florence Nicholson in 1883, but had some sort of a mental breakdown on his honeymoon and spent a short spell in an asylum. Then his father, Julius, decided to take William on holiday to Matlock in Derbyshire to help him recover. While they were there, William killed Julius with a chamberpot in the lodgings they had taken in the town, and then tried to cut his own throat; he lived and was found, next to the body of his dead father, by the police.

William Rutherford Benn was sent to Broadmoor and to this day I do not know whether Margaret Rutherford ever knew what had happened to her father. Later he began to recover and the Home Secretary at the time released him. Margaret was born some time after this sad saga.

William later went to India as a journalist, but when his brother John heard that he had decided to remarry there following the death of Florence, he felt obliged to stop the marriage. When William returned to England, he was recommitted. William was
my
father’s favourite uncle, and the tragedy had a profound effect on his life.

When my dad was about to marry my mother in 1920, my grandfather John actually wrote to my mother’s father to report this history, though it never occurred to him to write direct to my mother, who was, after all, the bride about to marry into a family with this tragic background. This absolutely incensed Mother’s mother, who came out against the wedding and stood outside the church while the marriage took place, announcing to all and sundry that she was not in favour of it; it is not clear to me whether the guests of the wedding in St Margaret’s Church in Westminster knew who this strange lady was.

Margaret Rutherford herself later married an actor called Stringer Davis, and it was part of an understanding that he would always have a small role in the films in which she was taking part.

Margaret was always very kind to me, and I have many happy memories of sitting with her on the beach at Bexhill as a child, and of occasions when we met in the years before her death.

The
News of the World
once paid a genealogist to research the Benn ancestry. It discovered the story and printed photographs of Margaret and of me, to imply that I had a streak of inherited madness. I worried what political damage this might do, but the only reference ever made to me about it was from a friendly London cab driver, who said, ‘I am sorry to hear about your uncle!’ So much for the power of the press.